Partnerships can often more effectively integrate and customize Web-based products and services. For example, organizations, such as retailers and schools, may create Web sites that provide access to a combination of products and services developed by the hosting organization and by selected third party suppliers. The combination of home-grown and third party products and services are often tailored to the interests of the hosting organization. Thus, a book retailer may offer its own book inventory through its Web site along with electronic products from a third party electronics retailer. Typically, this partnering is accomplished by either cross linking between one retailer's Web site and the other retailer's Web site, or arranging cross ordering of both sets of products through either retailer's Web site.
However, in some instances, one partner does not wish to openly offer its proprietary products or services through the other partner's Web site, and the other partner does not wish to enable its users to simply link to a separate, proprietary Web site. In these instances, one partner wishes to protect the proprietary aspects of its products or services, while the other partner wishes to manage its users by controlling access to, and data furnished by one or more selected proprietary providers. Nevertheless, the partners still wish to cooperate in some fashion.
A significant example of this dichotomy is a school partnering with a provider of proprietary learning content and assessment services. Schools increasingly want to provide school-provided learning content to their students through a Web site, but also wish to provide third party, proprietary learning content and testing services to their students through the same Web site to enable the school to manage student assignments and utilize standardized tests for evaluating student progress. For instance, many schools that provide education from kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) are gravitating towards proprietary, but standardized assessments that are provided by recognized experts in the educational assessment industry (e.g., Scantron, Princeton Review, Harcourt, etc.), rather than providing only school-developed assessments, such as traditional exams. These proprietary assessments are aligned to specific learning outcomes, and have been designed by psychometricians to accurately measure student performance against standards that are often mandated by an authority such as a state or federal government. Funding for a school is often directly tied to performance of its students on these types of assessments. Accordingly, schools are increasingly looking for complete assessment and accountability solutions that provide standardized and aligned assessments from a recognized assessment provider.
There are a limited number of recognized assessment providers involved in K-12 education that have sufficient credibility and name recognition to make a complete assessment and accountability solution acceptable for wide use. These specialized providers consider their grading algorithms and assessment items to be valuable intellectual property. They will not allow their assessment software and algorithms to be disclosed and used outside their control. However, these providers also recognize the increasing importance of electronic learning platforms in their marketplace, and desire a way for communicating with school Learning Management Systems (LMSs), while protecting the providers' proprietary information and intellectual property.
Conversely, schools want to maintain control over the learning platform and the reporting functionality regarding their own students. Currently, school LMSs do not enable a school to centrally manage assignments and testing results, while at the same time, enabling third party providers to maintain secure control over their proprietary content and testing services. Instead, content is either local to the LMS, or when hosted remotely by a proprietary provider, is presented through simple Web links or framed in a browser frameset or iframe.
Attempts have been made to develop standards to allow third party providers to communicate with an LMS both to get information about a student (e.g., a proprietary test assigned to the student by the LMS) and to return information to the LMS about the student's performance. A notable standard is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) from the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (http://www.adlnet.org). The SCORM defines a Web-based learning “Content Aggregation Model” and “Run-Time Environment” (RTE) for learning objects that enable interoperability, accessibility, and reusability of Web-based learning content. However, the SCORM RTE does not allow for cross-domain communication between content and LMS. Thus, content using the SCORM RTE must be hosted on the same domain as the LMS itself. This requires proprietary providers to sacrifice the proprietary nature of their services. Similarly, another standard, known as the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) specification from IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (http://www.imsglobal.org), enables the interchange of assessment items between systems. However, again, because it is a standard, proprietary providers must modify and/or divulge some of their proprietary techniques. For example, the proprietary providers may have to disclose some of their grading mechanisms, which they consider their proprietary information and part of their intellectual property. As a result, proprietary assessment providers resist these standards. Other results-reporting solutions such as direct server-to-server communication suffer from additional security-related issues. For example, if a school server is to be exposed via a Web Services application programming interface (API) to a content provider's server, it is often necessary to configure the school's proxy server specially for that content provider. This operation requires a school or district information technology (IT) department to do special configuration for each content provider. Clearly, a need exists for an alternative that will protect proprietary systems by allowing proprietary providers to host their own proprietary content and services, yet report results back to an LMS for customizing and managing student assignments and progress.